Arcade

by Robert Maxxe

  His rationalizing, his apology for the inhuman was bad enough. But it was the word that sparked her full fury. "Damn you, we're talking about lives, the sanctity of minds! And you boil it down to nothing more than data! You goddamn engineers, computer-heads—you're like the mindless generals who can shrug off nuclear war, killing whole civilizations, as just so many 'megadeaths!' " She advanced on him, overwhelmed by the passions loosed within her at the need to draw this line. "Our minds, Lon, the minds of our children —there isn't anything more sacred. Those are the temples of the human spirit, and that thing"—she pointed an accusing finger at the shell of the game and wished to God, her own human notion of God, that lightning would strike the thing down—"that defiles us."

  He gazed at her passively, letting the fires burn down. "It comes from us," he said then. "It's conceived by our minds."

  She shook her head, refused to believe. "It couldn't . . . I don't know what he is, or what he wants from us, but I know that Peale's not human, that no man could conceive this—"

  "It took an intelligence to make," Lon cut in, "and it's here on earth where the intelligence belongs to us. We've met the people who put it together, too, ordinary people. So however miraculous it is, I'm not ready to give the credit to God or the Devil . . . or a cabal of machines that have decided they don't need us as much as we need them." He brought his voice down, and reached out toward her, a gesture of appeasement. "But no one man could conceive it, you're right about that. And certainly not Peale—though he looks human enough to me. There's much more than one man's ideas or ambitions behind this. The research that would go into it—the resources to fund it—keep it a secret—hell, it would be more than a lot of governments could support. . . ."

  She had no heart left for fighting him. And it was comforting to relax into the belief that nothing more than earthly forces were at work. Surrendering, she took the few steps that brought her close to Lon, and leaned into him, head on his shoulder. "Oh God," she moaned, "who are they? What do they want with the children?"

  "We'll find out," he said.

  "But never in time," Carrie sighed. "The game's near the end, the last level, I can feel it—I've seen that the spacies are ready to get through. And as soon as Peale finds this one game missing, he'll push ahead even faster—"

  "We'll find where it comes from," he said.

  "How? I've been looking for weeks, and it all leads to this." Her eyes swept over the junkyard. "Now even Peale's gone underground."

  "I think we can find him, though." And suddenly he was moving to the chair where he had dropped his coat when they came in. "C'mon," he said buoyantly as he slipped into the coat. "Let's go." He started turning off the lights in Mrs. Dilham's littered parlor.

  "Go where?" Carrie asked. Though no less doubtful, she was caught up, grabbing up her own coat, preparing to leave.

  Lon paused, looked at her, and lightly patted a place over his heart —the shirt pocket into which he had dropped the jewel-like cube.

  "To listen to the radio," he said.

  35

  The Intellitronics plant wasn't humming as it had been on Carrie's first visit, but even at four o'clock in the morning some of the automated production lines were in operation, overseen by a skeleton crew. As Carrie followed Lon along the corridor with its fishbowl view of the factory floor, here and there she saw a figure moving among the conveyors. The sorcerer's apprentices.

  Lon didn't go to his office, but continued past several doors and stopped at one marked LAB 4. It was locked, though there was no handle or keyhole. The door opened automatically when he pressed his thumb against a plaque on the wall. The plaque, he told Carrie, was a sensitized plate that could read fingerprints and match them against a computer file of prints for all personnel authorized to enter.

  "Seems a much simpler way to make an I.D.," Carrie said, "than all that chemical mumbo-jumbo. Why wasn't this used in the game?"

  "The identification there is more than a security procedure. Knowing the body chemistry of each player is essential for feeding them information, adjusting the impulses the game transmits."

  The laboratory was a large, brightly lit room with workbenches along every wall. The benches were all crammed with partially assembled electronic apparatus and instruments used for testing and diagnostics. Nests of cables sprouted everywhere. The only piece of equipment recognizable to Carrie was a Mr. Coffee machine in one corner.

  It was here that Lon hoped to learn more about the tiny blue-black cube. During the drive over he had explained to Carrie that, with the aid of sophisticated analytical devices, it ought to be possible to determine the nature of the radio frequencies being used for data exchange—whether they were conventional or microwave satellite transmissions, for example—and then proceed to trace their exact source. Also, by "listening" to the signals through one of his powerful computers, messages coming through the cube-radio might actually be decoded.

  Pushing aside some of the clutter, Lon cleared a space at one of the benches. All along the walls there were high-intensity lamps on pivoting arms. Lon reached for the nearest one, swung it over and turned it on. Finally, he slipped two fingers carefully into his shirt pocket and lifted out the glittering cube, which he set delicately on the counter.

  Again, Carrie marveled at the object. The color, the darkest a blue could be without being perceived as black, combined with the trace of translucency, gave the effect somehow of peering into something —minuscule as it was—of great depth, even vastness. It was as if, in the way that ice could be cut from a frozen lake, a geometric fragment had been excised from the night sky. The tiny thing lying in front of her, Carrie could almost believe, was a chip out of space itself.

  Lon turned the cube around so that the two contact filaments emerging from one side were facing them. ". . . better get inside this casing and look at the circuits before I put any current through . . ." he murmured, bending down to eye the object closely. "How the hell to do it, though? Seems to be formed in one piece . . . welded, maybe, or sealed with epoxy. . . ."

  Under the benches were tiers of drawers labeled on the front. Lon scanned the labels, then pulled a drawer and took out a small jigsaw with a blade like piano wire. He placed the blade across one edge of the cube and pulled it back and forth, lightly at first, then increasing the pressure. After a minute of sawing, he paused. There wasn't the least sign of a cut on the cube—not so much as a scratch in its perfect luster.

  Lon tipped the cube onto the corner where two sides met and, holding it in place with a fingertip, he sawed across the sharp right angle facing him.

  The blade broke with a twang.

  Lon looked at the limp ends of wire hanging from the saw. "That was a diamond-edge titanium-alloy blade," he muttered. "The hardest, sharpest goddamn . . ." He grabbed up the cube, suddenly not being so dainty with it. "And this little bugger cut through it like a hot knife through butter!"

  "Then you can't open it?"

  "Not if I do it the hard way. Which leaves no choice but the easy way."

  "Why didn't you start with that?"

  "It's a laser, Carrie. It'll cut through anything, but unless I'm very careful, while I'm getting this open I might also damage everything inside, cook it all down to a useless blob."

  Lon walked across the lab to a corner where several instruments were arrayed. Carrie followed, and stood by for several minutes as he experimented, connecting the contact filaments from the cube to various pieces of equipment. He identified each in turn—an oscilloscope, an ohmmeter, a logic analyzer—as he performed the procedures, and gave a running commentary: this one was to test what amount of current would activate the cube, that one tested for a radio signal, another might be able to map the circuits within.

  Perhaps because she was so exhausted, Carrie absorbed little of what he was telling her. She was tempted to say they could let it wait for a day, go home and rest. But she knew Lon was right to press ahead. They were in a race against Peale to determine the fate of t
he children. By now he might already know that one of the games had been taken from the arcade—the machines could have sent out an alarm through electronic warning devices. And Peale's response would undoubtedly be to step up his efforts; he'd want the spacies to "get through" before anything could interfere.

  "Nothing," Lon said glumly after tinkering with the cube for fifteen minutes. "I can't make a connection. The thing is apparently designed to work only with that electrolyte the game has running through its 'veins.' "

  There was silence. Carrie wasn't sure from what Lon had said if he had given up.

  Abruptly, he wheeled around and headed out to the corridor. Carrie hurried after him.

  She caught up as he was unlocking another door marked LASER OPS, using the thumb procedure.

  The room they entered was the same size as the first electronics lab, but there were no windows and no counters lining the walls. Most of the equipment was on a long table in the middle of the floor. The exception, a massive machine that reminded Carrie of the X-ray camera in her dentist's office, stood in a separate compartment behind a glass partition at one end of the room. This, Lon said, was the most powerful of the laser generators in the lab. Two smaller ones stood on the tabletop, each consisting of a compact metal housing behind a barrel-shaped tube, rather like a slide projector. Placed at one end of the table, their barrels were aimed at metal platforms on the opposite end.

  Lon went about preparing the cube "for surgery," as he put it. First, he secured it in a small vise that could be adjusted to move along calibrated lines scored on the metal platforms. Then he walked around to one of the small generators, sighted through an optical range-finder attachment, and twiddled some dials on a control board. Meanwhile, he chattered to Carrie about the way lasers worked. A burst of light, sent through a ruby crystal cylinder with a mirror at one end and a partially mirrored surface at the other, would bounce back and forth within the rod, each passage of light agitating the atoms of the crystal more and more, thus causing tremendous light energy to build up. At the speed light moved, it would take no more than a fraction of a second before a beam so intense it could burn through the hardest metal came shooting out through the partial mirror at one end of the rod.

  "Biggest advance in safe-cracking to come down the pike since nitro," Lon quipped. "Though we use it for more mundane jobs, like etching circuits into microchips. A laser beam can be focused very precisely."

  Which, he repeated, would have to be done now if they were going to get into the cube without destroying whatever it contained. Though the beam could be adjusted to penetrate to any depth, without knowing exactly what thickness the outer shell was, it might cut too deep. To be on the safe side, Lon would start by tuning the laser to do no more than etch the surface.

  The big generator was switched on. At the push of a button, the necessary pulse of energy would surge through it, and the laser beam would shoot out.

  Carrie edged back slightly from the table, Lon checked his adjustments once more, then he pushed the button.

  There was a loud snap, followed by a faint continuing hum from the generator. Carrie saw no light beam, however.

  "You can't see the laser in natural light," Lon explained, "but keep your eye on the target."

  On the surface of the cube, Carrie thought she saw a glowing pinpoint, but that was all. A minute went by; there was no change. Had there been a malfunction? She turned and saw Lon frowning as he scanned the meters and dials of the control panel.

  ". . . I can't understand it . . ." he murmured. He turned a dial and the humming noise faded. Walking to the other end of the table, he inspected the cube. There wasn't a mark on it. He returned to the controls, made some adjustments, and switched on the beam again.

  After a minute he turned it off, went back to the cube and stared at it. "Impossible," he said.

  Carrie moved up beside him. "What?"

  "It's completely unaffected. I've nailed this thing now with enough energy to burn a hole through a diamond. A diamond, Carrie —that's supposed to be the hardest substance on earth . . . and this is harder. Some space-age stuff I never heard of." He shook his head. "I'm afraid it's going to be impossible to open."

  Carrie's heart sank, but when Lon went on staring at the cube and slowly shaking his head, she lost her patience. "Damn it, Alonzo, try something, anyway. I thought you were named for an old man who believed in never tossing in the towel."

  He gave her a fierce look, unamused.

  But then he went into action. He shifted the cube quickly to a different platform, and spent a couple of minutes adjusting its position in the standing vise. Then he hurried behind the glass partition. He turned on the powerful generator again, and took a lot longer dialing knobs and accurately targeting the laser than he had before—"tuning the beam," he said. Carrie joined him.

  "If this doesn't work," he said, moving his finger to the activating button, "there'll be nothing left short of dropping a bomb on it."

  He pressed his finger down.

  The hum from the large generator was louder and throatier. And this time, as the beam passed through the glass partition, Carrie was able to see a pencil-line of intense red light. Her eye followed the line to a point on the edge of the cube.

  For ten seconds, twenty, they watched. Nothing happened. Lon finally threw up his hands and turned to the generator, about to switch it off.

  Suddenly there was an explosive flash, a light so searingly brilliant that Carrie, who'd kept watching the target, had the image burned onto her retina for several moments.

  Seeing Carrie rub at her eyes, Lon took her face between his hands. "Good God, are you all right?"

  Her eyes began to clear. "I think so." A couple of seconds more and she was able to give a definitive nod. Then they rushed to examine the cube.

  It wasn't there—at least not in the same form. The glittering blue-black solid was gone. In its place was a yellowish substance of pale transparency. It was still in the shape of a cube, but when Lon touched it, he found it was rubbery, gelatinous. It wobbled. He left it on the platform.

  "How could it turn into this?" Carrie asked.

  "It wasn't presto-chango," Lon said. "The blue stuff was an outside shell. The laser brought it to the flash point and it vaporized. This is what the casing was there to protect."

  "But you said . . . that's where it all . . ."

  "It's in there," Lon said, teeth clenched as he regarded the yellowish rubbery block, as if daring it to prove him wrong. "It's got to be in there."

  Carrie didn't know whether to laugh or cry, seeing the thing on which their hopes had settled: not a radio, not an electronic chip etched with microcircuits; it looked like nothing so much as lemon Jell-O.

  Lon straightened up abruptly, rummaged for a few moments around the room, and then walked out, calling over his shoulder, "Back in a minute. Keep your eye on that thing—in case it tries to walk away."

  Lightly as he meant it, Lon's remark left Carrie with a spooky feeling about the bite of lemon Jell-O. She edged away from the table.

  He returned in a minute holding a small round dish of clear glass with a cover on it. Using the cover, he nudged the "Jell-O" from the platform into the dish. Then, with a "c'mon" flipped over his shoulder to Carrie, he raced from the room.

  They went down the hall to yet another lab where the door was already open. In this the work counters were arranged in several parallel rows, and on each there were half a dozen microscopes. Hundreds of sterile glass dishes like the one in Lon's hand were scattered around, each containing a single tiny square chip. Memory chips, Lon explained, that were inspected under the microscopes.

  Very carefully, he transferred the rubbery yellow cube to a sterile glass slide, placed it in a holder under the lens of one microscope, then switched on a bright light that shone onto the holder. At last he put his eyes to the binocular eyepiece of the microscope,

  Carrie heard him release a breath, a long, very slow exhalation.

  "What
do you see?" she asked quickly.

  ". . . I was wrong," he said softly. "Dead wrong."

  "What is it?" Carrie asked again. Lon seemed hypnotized, in a way that unnerved her.

  "Another world," he said and stood aside. "Have a look." She took his place at the eyepiece.

  Necklaces of tiny beads, that was the first thing she thought of. Thousands, tens of thousands of small grayish dots, each with a white center, were strung together in long chains. The strands crisscrossed over one another, but not in the haphazard jumble of necklaces tossed into a jewel box. They organized into a design of rigid geometrics, a tight maze of lines that intersected and doubled back over themselves and sometimes ran in parallel lines with barely perceptible spaces in between. Carrie gathered it was an electronic circuit. It was harder to understand why Lon had described it as another world. Wasn't this the world that was already familiar to him?

  And then, before her eyes, she saw the intricate pattern of lines and angles reorganize. Parallels formed where there had been intersections, strands that had been at angles suddenly straightened while others that had been straight bent into perpendiculars, and then bent again to intersect with themselves. She was reminded of those marching bands that came out at halftime in the big football games, the way they reformed themselves to spell out different words or make living pictures, all the while playing the music. If you were way, way up in the Goodyear blimp, and if the band had maybe a hundred thousand players instead of a hundred, and if it wasn't spelling anything but just fooling around with geometric patterns, it would look like what she saw under the microscope.